


Adding Shadows

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Fights, Gen, Gray Force User(s), Mind Control, Old Canon and Expanded Universe Elements, Prompt Fill, it's the "Puppetmaster" episode of Avatar that's it that's the fic, vaguely shippy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:29:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22658593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: Cara staggers back, pulling Din with her, and coughs in the dust cloud that rises from the rubble. No light shines through the boulders that block their exit.“Okay,” she says when she can speak again. “That was pretty messed up. What’s the plan?”Djarin’s headlamp shuts off.
Relationships: Cara Dune & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 98





	Adding Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> An anonymous prompter requested: "can we get a brainwashed mando and cara having to slap some sense into him (or fuck some sense into him?)"

As a rule, Cara does not follow strangers into dark, enclosed spaces. But the village elder is leading them into a cave set deep in the black rock hills, and the kid is following her, and Djarin is following the kid, and Cara follows him, because this might as well happen. 

She sidles closer to him, close enough to speak without the elder and her two lieutenants overhearing. “Did you see any children back in town?” 

He shakes his head. “Maybe we frightened them.” 

Maybe. But the kid is cute enough to draw out every child in a fifty kilometer radius on most planets. Either the people here are so grim that a tiny cherubic reptile doesn’t put their children at ease, or the people here are so grim that they haven’t bred. Cara doesn’t like either option. 

They came here based on the flimsiest of rumors. Karga knew a guy who knew a guy who swore he’d once been to a planet where people could move things with their mind. The place wasn’t on any star charts from the last three decades, which seemed like a good thing, an encouraging thing. 

But in the end Djarin found them, because that’s what he does. They landed and followed an unsmiling welcome party into town, where they met Selie, the elder. 

It was then they began to learn the history of this planet. 

“What is this place?” Djarin asks, hesitating like a sensible person at the mouth of the cave. 

“If you wish to understand, come inside.” Selie has already disappeared into the blackness, and the child goes in after her, and that, of course, means Djarin does too. 

Cara scowls, and follows. 

Inside, Djarin’s headlamp sweeps a space fifteen meters in diameter. It’s roughly circular, with waist-high stalagmite ridges forming a broken ring a couple meters in from the walls. They’ve entered through the only exit. 

The walls are marked. 

She sees the hashes first: unsteady rows scratched into the stone. A field of hashes a meter and a half across, rising from where they are darkest and oldest at floor level, to as far as an average humanoid could reach, just below the ceiling. They overflow the original bounds of the field and spread further down the wall in meandering lines, in between the names. 

Hundreds of names. Some in Aurebesh, some in High Galactic, some in alphabets Cara doesn’t recognize. The names fill the rest of the wall, around the circumference of the cave. 

“They were all sent here like you?” Djarin asks. 

“Yes,” says Selie. She and her fellow settlers let him and Cara proceed a few steps deeper into the cave. The little womp rat hangs back with Selie, scratching lightly at the stone as if to leave his own mark. “Those who were not chosen as padawans were given placements instead. Work. A calling, they named it.” 

“How did you avoid what happened to the Order?” Cara asks. 

In the light reflecting off the cave wall, Selie’s eyes seem equally cavernous as she turns them on Cara. “Four decades ago, the Agricultural Corps determined this planet was unfit for their purposes, and discontinued operations here.” 

“They left you with nothing?” Djarin says. “No supply runs? No communication?” 

“By then, the settlement was self-sustaining.” There’s a bitter twist to her mouth. Cara saw first-hand how little they have. 

Djarin bends to shine his headlamp on a handprint in red clay. “Why couldn’t you have returned to your families?” 

“Some of us were orphans. Some were rescued from wars on our home planets, only to discover during our training that our families were killed. In some cases, the records were lost in the interim.” 

Selie takes a breath. “For my part, I could have returned. But my parents delivered me to the Jedi Order because they could not provide for me and all my siblings, and they could not fathom my gifts. There were others whose families wanted nothing to do with them. To be sent here, after first being sent away to the Order, was a second injury.” 

Djarin straightens. As she surveys the set of his shoulders and cant of his helmet, Cara angles her feet outward and flexes her knees, ready for whatever comes next. 

“This angers you,” Selie observes. 

“Yes,” says Djarin, his voice dangerously calm. 

Selie reaches over to touch the handprint, crumbling the red clay. “We were children. Terrified, alone. Half-trained, without the skill to control our abilities.” Now she stoops to the kid, who reaches for her. As Selie picks him up, Cara takes half a step forward, but Djarin doesn’t move. 

Something has changed in the air, some current flowing between the elder and him; it raises bumps on Cara’s arms. “Our fear turned to anger,” Selie says, “anger to hate. And hate led to suffering.” 

Selie steps backward, out into daylight and open air. “Mando,” Cara warns, but he’s still locked up in his own thoughts. Only when the kid wails--too late--does Djarin twitch like he’s been shocked. Cara reaches out to shove him toward Selie, but the other two abandoned apprentices raise their hands, and the ground shakes under Cara’s feet. 

The mouth of the cave collapses. 

Cara staggers back, pulling Din with her, and coughs in the dust cloud that rises from the rubble. No light shines through the boulders that block their exit. 

“Okay,” she says when she can speak again. “That was pretty messed up. What’s the plan?” 

Djarin’s headlamp shuts off. 

“What the h--” The rest of the sentence leaves her in a wheeze when Djarin drives his fist into Cara’s gut. She coughs again, stars flashing in her vision, and takes another hit, to the jaw this time. Nothing she can’t handle, though it does hurt more when she can’t see it coming. 

She reaches for the chemlight on her belt, but Djarin jabs her inside the elbow. A spike of pain radiates to her hand, and her fingers won’t close. Cara hears his blaster whine, and lunges for where his arm ought to be. The shot goes wide, and the red light illuminates him for just an instant, bright steel and black, empty visor. 

They did something to him. She can hear big, panicked gulps inside the helmet. Fear turns to anger, and anger turns to this. Maybe he doesn’t even really see her. In the imaging on his display she would be an abstraction, nothing more than a target lock on a colorful blob. 

Cara twists his arm, and hears the gratifying sound of his blaster hitting the ground. She takes the opportunity to knee him in the gut, and then she lets go and runs, directionless. A gout of flame follows, but she’s out of range. The instant of light is just enough for her to find a crop of stalagmites to huddle behind. 

He could kill her here. The dark is to his advantage. But in the wake of the flamethrower, it will take a minute for the thermal sensor to recalibrate. 

She’ll have one shot, and if she misses, she dies here, and so does he, and his boy will be raised and shaped and twisted by these bitter fearful people into something she would rather not think about. 

Cara sweeps one hand along the ground until she finds a rock spar, which loosens after a solid yank. She hears the clink of beskar when he turns toward the sound. Cara throws as hard as she can, backwards over the stalagmites, and the rock shatters against the far wall, and the cave lights up orange again. 

She is already up and over the ridge, and running at his silhouette. 

Djarin stumbles as she leaps onto his back, and he pounds his fist on the arm she locks around his neck, but he’s too slow to stop her when her free hand pulls the helmet off and tosses it away. 

He thrashes and falls backward, and that’s a hard landing that Cara takes entirely on her spine and hips, but she holds on, grabbing her own wrist for leverage to bar her forearm across his throat. Three little silver and blue darts streak out of his vambrace--the whizzing birds, or whatever they’re called--but they die in sparks against the wall. 

It feels like a lifetime before he sags on top of her. Cara relaxes her arm just enough that he can get back to breathing, but she doesn’t let him go. Not yet, not until he wakes up and she’s sure he’s himself. 

“Okay,” she sighs. “It’s okay.” She shifts to slide his mass carefully off of her. He clanks onto the ground. “You needed some decent sleep anyway, buddy.” 

Cara gets her bicep under the back of his neck and crooks her arm around him. A comfortable gesture, for two people who trust each other and may have to choke each other out again sometime. Her free hand settles on his hair. It soothes her, to touch it. 

“After careful consideration,” she says, “I don’t think these are the sorcerers we’re looking for.” 

Perhaps she dozes. The total dark compresses time, makes it hard to tell. At one point she thinks she hears Selie’s voice and she jerks fully awake and ready, but there’s no sound except the blood in her ears and Din’s soft breath. 

He gasps sometime later and goes rigid, and Cara’s arm tightens, but his hand feels along her gauntlet, and he says, “Cara?” 

There are no words for the relief she feels. “Yeah,” she says. “I’m right here.” 

“You’re… petting my hair.” 

Kriff. She takes her hand away, starts to move her other arm too. “Sorry.” 

“Don’t have to stop,” he says. 

Cara hesitates. She raises her gauntlet to her mouth, bites the fingertips to pull them off, and sinks her bare hand back into his hair. 

“Sorry about earlier,” he murmurs. 

“It’s all right,” she tells him, and she means it. There’s no reason he should feel guilty for this. 

“Good thing you can still kick my ass.” 

She musses his hair. “Still and always.” 

He puts his hand up, over hers, and Cara turns her palm toward his and lets him hold on. “The kid,” he sighs. “We have to get out of here.” 

Cara raises her arm so he can roll to his feet. “I’ve got my eyes covered,” she tells him, and passes him her chemlight so he can find the helmet. 

“Thank you.” Presently his voice, filtered once more, says, “Clear.” Cara removes her hand from her eyes and finds him reaching down to her. 

She takes his hand and lets him hoist her up. The headlamp is too bright at this range, but she keeps meeting his stare as long as he holds it. 

Djarin lifts his hand, and the back of one finger touches her jaw, which must be bruising up by now. 

Cara smirks at him. 

He looks away, and fiddles with his vambrace, and an extension slides out near the flamethrower nozzle. “You got a cutting attachment installed?” Cara says. 

The cutter’s tip sparks white-hot, throwing their shadows against the walls. “After Nevarro? Absolutely.” 

She considers the wall of rock. “We’ll asphyxiate before you get through all of it.” 

“You have a better idea?” 

She reaches behind him to flick one finger against the Rising Phoenix. “Use the concussion missile.” 

He recoils. “So you can bleed from the ears? Not a chance.” 

“It’ll knock me out, but you can drag me to the ship.” 

Djarin stoops down at the pile of rubble, and gets to work. “I need you for what comes after this.” 

How sweet. “Something tells me you won’t need me to blast in there and get your boy back. They’re not going to be able to mess with your mind again.” And if Cara understood the Armorer correctly, this is exactly the sort of work Mandalorian armor was made for. 

“I am a lot more calm now,” he deadpans. 

“The power of a nap.” Cara leans on one of the larger boulders. “Which part pissed you off most? The fact that they brought you in here to die, or the fact that they took the kid?” 

Djarin shuts off the cutter, and turns his headlamp toward the markings on the wall. “These people were forgotten. No one ever made them feel like they were a part of anything.” 

Ah. Right. “So we’re going to get the kid and then leave? Let go and live well?” 

“Oh no.” He turns the cutter back on. “We’re going to destroy them.” 

Cara grins. 

And then she holds up her hand to shield her eyes against a flood of light, because what used to be a wall of fallen stone is now… a miniature asteroid field. Djarin grabs her and yanks her away just as her own boulder rises up from the ground. 

Blaster drawn, he peers out into the last of the daylight. Then he sighs, and holsters his pistol. Cara squints past him at the little green figure on the other side of the floating rocks, with his eyes half-closed and one tiny hand outstretched. 

She follows Djarin out between the rocks. “What do you think?” he says, taking a knee beside the kid. 

The kid babbles at him, scatters the rocks, and lifts his arms to be picked up. 

“I thought so,” says Din. 

“Can you translate?” Cara says. “I don’t speak baby.” 

Djarin tucks the kid against his side and starts for the _Razor Crest_. “He says we should let go and live well.” 

“They did leave us to die,” she reminds him. It’s not like him to walk away when he’s been wronged--but the idea is growing on her. It’s been kind of a day. Fighting him took a toll deeper than sore muscles, and she’ll need a good long hyperspace jump to sort through it. 

Meantime, she could use some painkillers, a little bacta salve for her jaw. Maybe Djarin can put it on her. 

No, she doesn’t run from a fight, but Din moves at more of a strolling pace. Cara brushes off the last of the cave dust, and she follows. 

**Author's Note:**

> Cheers for reading! You can send me Cara prompts on my Tumblr @hauntedfalcon.


End file.
